According to Zen Buddhist Monk and Author Thich Nhat Hanh “most people are afraid of suffering. But suffering is a kind of mud to help the lotus flower of happiness grow. There can be no lotus flower without the mud.”
Or, put simply:
No mud, no lotus.
At any point in time, hundreds of thousands of lotus seeds lie in the bottom of murky dark ponds. Some will germinate immediately upon landing in the mud, eager to get on with the difficult process of pushing through its thick stinking layers so they can eventually unfurl their petals into a full blooming lotus. A few, though, will wait for just the right conditions to start their journey to full bloom. The longest a lotus seed has waited is 1300 years. Knowing how hard that journey through the mud can be, I understand that wait. It’s best to be prepared, to start when you are ready. When you have the courage.
In the Buddhist and spiritual traditions sense is made of the mud through a belief that our souls inhabit a physical form on this planet so they can, like the lotus, grow, evolve, and, ultimately, bloom. Into enlightenment. But, just like with the lotus seed, undertaking a journey on this planet is not for the faint hearted; faint soled; or faint souled. My own human seed shares the reluctance of the lotus’, its hesitation to sprout, or, more accurately, to shoot. For happiness, the light, the stars.
A psychotherapist once told me that he believed the root of all suffering was rooted in our own consciousness; that of our death, and of being on a planet orbiting a sun in a galaxy that we know nothing about. Oh, yes I know, we like to think we have some of it figured it, that we know some of it, but really our knowing is less than even the Planck Length. All we can really say is that we come from star dust, we go back to star dust, it’s all just star dust. We just don’t know what star dust is, or the thing between the dust. The dark matter. It’s why we are all, at the heart of it, at the soul of it, scared of the dark. Why we prefer the light.
Light. We all reach for it, trees, plants, even reptiles. Nothing exists without the light, even creatures in the deepest darkest parts of the ocean, where light cannot reach, somehow miraculously make their own. No one likes living in the dark. Let your light shine bright, don’t dim it for anyone. It’s the mantra of our time. That it is usually us dimming our light has escaped most. We hold the light dimmer switch with our shame, self-doubt, self-loathing, self-sabotage. It’s us we need to watch out for. We are the bogey man in the dark, waiting to pounce. I say we, I mean our minds.
So, we cycle through our lives, levelling up or down, repeating the stage, the same path of the journey, the eternal suffering of being human. A never ending game of Samsara.
Until.
If we don’t give up.
We evolve.
Enough to reach the light.
Finally free of the mud. Bursting through the dank, stank, watery abyss, into fresh air and light, finally able to see. Just not with our human eyes. With our third eye. A three eye frog emerging from a dark swamp, kissed by an archangel, turned into, not a prince, but a Buddha.
At that point, our consciousness no longer matters. We are conscious of our unconscious, we know we are the Universe and the Universe is us, that it is all just energy. That what matters is matter, transitioning, transforming. Birth and death are not endings and beginnings, they are transfer stations, of our human dross into universal star dust. Fear and suffering no longer exist, we are just blooming flowers, existing for no other reason than to bloom. We just are. It’s a mind fuck. It has to be. The mind gets in the way, keeps us in the mud, so it has to be fucked. Or at the least ignored, only observed with gentle humour and love. But never to be believed. If we all truly understood how much our brains are faking it until we make it, we would be horrified at how much stock we place in our mind. How much power we give it. That’s us though. Ceding power to false gods, all filters and make up and power suits.
Reaching enlightenment isn’t easy though. Evidenced by how little of humanity achieves it. I have it on good authority that even when you hermit yourself away, monk like, using the powers of monastic living, it’s still hard. The great masters achieving only moments of blissful nirvana. A mere zeptosecond. Yet, it’s power is such that even in the smallest of dose known to humanity it is enough to keep us seeking. Micro-dosing before it was famous, when it relied on hours of meditation and separating from our mind. The old-fashioned way.
The masters have done the groundwork though, cleared and laid the path for us to follow. Provided a map to our Universe, or the way out of it. Galactic highways aren’t easy to find though, and you need a vehicle made up of universal love and compassion. I can’t even make it down a state highway without raging at my fellow human. In a very human car, an example of how far I veer off the path at times. It’s red and fast and was expensive. It gets me to my life destinations faster but makes my soul journey slower. That’s the thing with material possessions. They weigh us down, keep us in the mud.
I am grateful to the masters for shining the light on the path though. Providing a universal beacon for my fragile vulnerable plant shoot to reach for. Enabling me the ability to move from seed to shoot to shooting star. Like the grounding gravitating force that anchors me upon my birth, the concept of my infinite potential is radical or radicle. But it’s always masters isn’t it, not mistresses, that’s a different word all together. Different meaning. That’s the beef I have with enlightenment. It’s generally easier to reach if you are a master with a mistress. Behind every successful man is a strong woman. All the modern deities did it on the backs of women didn’t they. Buddha was only able to locate enlightenment under a tree for ten years because his wife was at home raising their child. I get he brought home enlightenment, but I wonder if she cursed him over those ten years, losing faith waiting for his. I wonder if I too, could achieve enlightenment if I had 10 years to myself. Is it harder to tame the mind in 10 minute bite sized pieces from a podcast with your kids and husband and dogs at the door? I think it is. But what do I know. I’m a mistress.
I have raised a child without the father. So perhaps that makes me biased. This father wasn’t off finding enlightenment for humanity though, he was off finding the life he wanted. It didn’t include me or his son. I also wasn’t left in a castle, I don’t think he was concerned with my material wellbeing. “I don’t give a fuck, you can both live in the gutter for all I care” were his parting words on that fateful evening he walked out. He didn’t quite have Buddha’s way with words either. I don’t know for certain, but I strongly suspect Buddha’s final words to Yasodhara were more eloquent.
This, then, is my story. Or more correctly my soul’s story. Of my time spent in the mud, buried up to my neck, wading through it while it cleaved at me with its gripping claws.
Stories about trauma will invariably become metaphoric soliloquies about journeys. No matter where you are with trauma you are always on some part of a journey, never quite done. Perpetual, constant, relentless journeying. On a path to healing or hell. From one mental state to another. It’s no wonder trauma is so exhausting, the amount of journeying that must be done.
That I will journey on a trauma road for my lifetime is something I have resisted for most of it. Don’t get me wrong, I have a high capacity for long journeys, I find something therapeutic in the meditative state of motion created from moving from one place to another. But there is always an end. It’s not infinite. There’s a point you get off, stop the journey. Reach the place you were travelling to.
The journey of trauma is not that kind of journey.
Instead, it’s a continual meandering path winding down to deep pits in dark places, then along monotonous stretches with bland scenery, before swerving suddenly into savage places where you fear you will die, before cresting a hill into the most beautiful of meadows with thick golden light, wildflowers, butterflies and a azure blue cloudless sky. And, the meandering never ends. As you approach each bend you hope this is the feted corner that you will finally turn, and you will reach the end of the road, no longer a vagabond traveller with your mental health slung over your back. But no matter how many corners you turn, the path remains. You continue to travel. At the end of your rope of an endless road.
Recently, though, I have come to realise that there is no point trying to get off the path, to find the end point. It just becomes a path to madness if I do. I have instead come to accept that I will not wake up free from anxiety and PTSD and all my phobias. I will always carry them; the art of my journey is to not have them weigh me down. That that is the real journey, the elusive end point I have been searching for. Years of avoidance, controlling the landscape, distraction, pretence, exhausting myself by carrying too much, numbing it all, none of it worked or will work. I still travel the same path.
Until, radical, wholehearted, no holding back, genuine, not an inkling of doubt, acceptance and leaning into my anxiety and PTSD and phobias. Letting go of control, breathing in the uncertainty of a world where uncertainty hurts, maims and even kills. Surrendering to suffering.
I believe in transcendence, and living a life free of my mental health, running through a beautiful meadow in a beautiful dress with long flowing hair, or being a wild horse unfettered, untamed, unbridled by my anxieties and phobias. But trusting the Universe is hard when its hard, ignoring the shrill persuasive seductive voice of my fear and anxiety is hard, living a full life exposed to risk of harm and bleeding and even dying is hard. Letting go of control, and checking, and reassurance from the checking is hard. Being Buddhist is hard. I want it though, and the Universe bloody well knows it. There’s no avoiding the hard. I’ve chosen the Lotus Flower, or it chose me.
So I am, then, walking on a Buddhist spiritual path rather than a mental health path. Searching for peace through understanding that my suffering, my trauma, have all been opportunities for another petal to unfurl in the creation of my full blooming. This is something that often happens to people who experience a lot of traumas, who end up walking through excessive amounts of mud in their lives. They become spiritual. They bloom lotus style. There is such a need to find meaning in the randomness of the pain and the suffering that you begin to oscillate between a need to control your world and all that’s in it and a complete letting go and surrendering to the whims of the Universe.
There have been times in my life, long periods, when I have floated in the stream of the Universe. Simply let go, and lain back, a naked Nymphaea on the surface of the Universe’s great river, floating whichever way it chose to take me. Jobs, partners, houses, door handles, holidays, places to eat, nail polish colours. All decided with reference to the Universe and all answers met with “it wasn’t meant to be” or it was.
It’s a freeing way to exist. But it involves a deep-seated and absolute trust in the Universe and a rock solid belief that it has your best interests in heart. That it is doing everything for your greater good. It’s helping you bloom into your own spectacular lotus. That is easier on the days when the answers are good, not painful. It’s not so easy when the pain is almost unbearable, and you think you are going to break from the weight of it. When you are lying in foetal position barely able to breath it hurts so much. Harder then to float, to surrender.
This then is my story of surrendering to suffering. To letting go. This is my story of finding peace through finding peace with that. This is my story of gratitude to be on the path, to have the courage to walk through the deep pits and savage lands and bask in the golden hued meadows. To trust. Myself and the Universe, who chose immersion in mud for me when I would have chosen anything but. A desperate Frodo, trying to reach Mordor, to throw a ring of shame, guilt, hate, abuse, fear, death trauma, loss, despair, into fiery depths.
Do I make it to enlightenment, is there a happy ending to my human tale? Am I an enlightened open lotus flower, or a closed lotus, no longer mud dwelling but not yet enlightened or am I still floundering my way through the mud underbelly of life? Or am I yet still the lotus seed, ungerminated, not even yet venturing into the mud. I don’t have the answer to that yet. It’s only been 50 years. And that’s nothing to my soul. But it has become apparent to me after all this time, that the answer to my enlightenment, my blooming, is at the end of a journey back through the traumas that caused it. I hope that the telling of my life’s path from mud to lotus proves to be a better healer than the wading of it.
But it’s not just that story. I can’t in good conscience let you read only the mud of my soul. That wouldn’t be right. My life has not been one of just mud. It is also a story of how I too eventually made it to the glittering shiny surface, erupted into the glistening rays of light. Took a breath as if it was my first, a huge gasp of air in a now clear and unclogged throat, filling lungs withered by years of cloying grief with the joy of being back in the light. It is the story of how, despite or because of, the mud, when I finally made it to the surface I discovered a myriad of petals existing in my soul. Hidden from me while I dwelled in the mud, revealed to me in their full glory by the light of the surface, to my clear and all seeing eyes. It is also the story of how I learnt to unfurl each of those petals, at first fragile and delicate, and then, in time, strong and sure. Until, when I hardly noticed it had happened, I had discovered and unfurled so many petals, that I resembled a blooming lotus.